Interview with Empire Syndicate
Empire Syndicate is a young duo of British musicians specializing in hybrid electronic/orchestral music.
Trailer Music News: When was Empire Syndicate founded ? Who are the people behind this new company?
Empire Syndicate: Empire Syndicate was founded at the end of 2012. Our names are Martyn Corbet and Josh Mellody, and we met at ACM in Guildford, UK, where we both studied for our degrees in music production.
TMN: Why the name “Empire Syndicate”?
ES: We do get asked that a lot actually! It kind of comes from the whole idea of ‘epic’ music… The syndication of something is basically it’s management or monopolization by several people or groups acting as a unified entity (a syndicate), and if was empires you were syndicating, well… that’s pretty epic! So it kind of goes with our music, and what we’re trying to do with that. It’s not easy picking names though! We probably spent more time on that than our first song! And there is something that feels slightly oxymoronic about it too… neither of us wants to try and work it out too much though because we don’t want to have to pick another name!
TMN: What genre(s) of music do you like to compose?
ES: Well… that changes every day. Obviously we have a lot of time for orchestral music, particularly the whole trailer score thing. It’s an incredibly satisfying type of music to make; short, full of emotion and as powerful as possible! We’re both the kind of people who like to take on new challenges as often as we can so between the two of us we’re always making a lot of different music. Aside from orchestral music, our house always has some dance music, like dubstep or house etc being made somewhere! It’s good for a musician to play with a lot of different types of music, and that’s something we both do a lot. It pushes your creative and technical limits and helps you to bust plateaus.
TMN: Do you use samples, or do you also record some of your music live?
ES: We’re both really hands on guys when it comes to production, but right now most of what we do is sampled. Of course it would be amazing to work with an orchestra for real soon! It’s something we’ve thought about. But they are two very different things. We’re really big on synthesis, a lot of our tracks feature electronic elements not just as accompaniment to the orchestral instruments but as significant parts of the songs, with a lot of focus on them. The next step for us is, to learn to play instruments such as cellos, french horns etc. ourselves, and start to work more live elements into our tracks. Because it is true that you can never replicate the uniqueness of real instruments with samples, not just in the performance of your parts but also when it comes to experimenting and goofing around.
TMN: What are your future projects? Perhaps an album?
ES: We have played with the idea of doing an album for a while now. I think we decided though, to wait until we can put a lot of real instruments in to the tracks, like we said. Because when we can do that, we think we can give people something really unique to hear.
TMN: Anything else you would like to share with us?
ES: Just more music! Stay tuned for that 🙂
TMN: Great! Looking forward to it!
Empire Syndicate’s music is currently not available to the public for purchase. For licensing information, contact them. Feel free to follow the company on Facebook for updates, Youtube, and SoundCloud where you can discover many more tracks!
